Zigbee Pro - The automation standard?

[valent]

http://www.cepro.com/article/has_home_automation_standard_finally_arrived_zigbee_pro_with_control4_as_an/

Have you heard about Zigbee Pro?

As they say:
"ZigBee aims to win the home automation-standards race, and the initial surge is about six weeks away, according to Eric Smith, CTO of Control4.

Control4 is a home-control manufacturer that claims roughly 1 million installed ZigBee nodes, including light dimmers, keypads, thermostats, controllers and universal remotes."

So is there any chance to see Zigbee Pro in LinuxMCE?

What is your oppinion about Zigbee Pro?

[Marie.O]

Just a quick note: There are single KNX/EIB installations with tens of thousands of installed nodes. A total of a million nodes is nothing.

And feel free to provide a driver, we will incorporate it. LinuxMCE is capable of supporting anything, someone just has to write drivers for it.

At the moment, there is no one writing a driver for Zigbee, that I know of. Most development effort is currently in the area of Z-Wave and KNX/EIB.

[hari]

i don't see any devices on the market yet... hey not even z-wave has everything for now like smoke detectors..

I don't think that ZigBee will catch up with others like Insteon, Z-Wave and Enocean. Also 2,4gHz is not optimal to get through walls...

br, Hari

[totallymaxed]

http://www.cepro.com/article/has_home_automation_standard_finally_arrived_zigbee_pro_with_control4_as_an/

Have you heard about Zigbee Pro?

As they say:
"ZigBee aims to win the home automation-standards race, and the initial surge is about six weeks away, according to Eric Smith, CTO of Control4.

Control4 is a home-control manufacturer that claims roughly 1 million installed ZigBee nodes, including light dimmers, keypads, thermostats, controllers and universal remotes."

So is there any chance to see Zigbee Pro in LinuxMCE?

What is your oppinion about Zigbee Pro?

There were two Chinese companies at this years CEBIT that were showing a limited range of Zigbee devices. Problem was that both admitted that each others devices would not interoperate...at all! Yes they use the same 2.4Ghz radio band but beyond that there was no interoperability. I have nothing against Zigbee at all but I cant see how it will catch-up with other competing technologies like ZWave, Insteon, ENocean etc.

Andrew

[hari]

good point Andrew. Now there is a zigbee home automation spec out, but it took them too long, and everybody using zigbee just uses the IEEE stack and runs his own "databytes" over it...

All the big players in the market already participate in multiple alliances. I really doubt that Zigbee will catch up..

br, Hari

[tschak909]

and implementing something that can TALK zigbee literally requires implementing what amounts to an object oriented virtual machine, which looks like a bastard cousin of CORBA.

ugh. design by committee. this is what happens. we get the X.500 of the home automation world.

-Thom

[hari]

ugh. design by committee. this is what happens. we get the X.500 of the home automation world.

ROTFL!! One could wonder how EnOcean can do HA with a fixed frame length and a few bytes ;-p

[nite_man]

It seems that ZigBee devices are interoperate now. The big advantage of ZigBee is close integration with TCP protocol and open protocol (as I know). Sure if somebody has a knowledge and time it'd be good to have another option for automation.

[totallymaxed]

It seems that ZigBee devices are interoperate now. The big advantage of ZigBee is close integration with TCP protocol and open protocol (as I know). Sure if somebody has a knowledge and time it'd be good to have another option for automation.

Well I think your link to Vesternet proves the point really...there are a tiny number of devices available (Notice none of Control4's devices are listed...they dont interoperate)...no light switches to give one example. Zigbee is still totally tied into single vendor deals and i cant see that changing at all. Witness my experience at CEBIT and also at the earlier e-Home show in Berlin...no one had interoperability at all.

KNX, ZZZWave, ENocean all have equivalents to the Z-202 - they work as well and do the same thing. Nothing wrong with the Z-202 but also nothing unique about the Z-202 at all...

Zigbee seems like a technology that us a little too late to the party to be frank.

All the best

Andrew

[vladvan]

If there is enough interest, I would be happy to create a Zigbee HA driver.  I have extensive experience in this domain and it wouldn't take very long.

[vladvan]

As a follow up, there has been some talk about communicating with power meters and doing energy related monitoring as well as sending. For some of this too happen, we would need a Zigbee SE profile added as a driver.

[domotiqa.com]

you can use interface like wago (exist card for knx, enocean, dali...)

[Marie.O]

If there is enough interest, I would be happy to create a Zigbee HA driver.  I have extensive experience in this domain and it wouldn't take very long.

Well, go ahead and do it. Our source code is available at
http://svn.linuxmce.org/svn/branches/LinuxMCE-0810/src

You might want to take a look at the Z-Wave driver and the latest EIB driver to get an idea on how to incorporate the driver into LinuxMCE.

Thanks for your offer, and good luck.